Reviews
“The Book as Agora,” TOHU MAGAZINE (October 2019).
How should art institutions respond to the current political climate? Michal B. Ron reviews Paper Monument’s recent book, in which various art professionals offer their propositions to six perceptive questions.
“Other than Whom?” TOHU MAGAZINE (January 2019).
“There is no curatorial passivism, any more than there is a passivist war.” Michal B. Ron reviews Maura Reilly’s book Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating and adds a note about the heroless politeness of the recent Berlin Biennial.
“The Problem of Nostalgia: Learning from Athens in documenta 14,” TOHU MAGAZINE (August 2017).
A depressing human condition resolved with grand gestures of politics, sentimentality, fashion, and merchandise. Michal B. Ron writes about documenta 14 in Kassel.
“Richard Wagner Pornographizes, Jacques Offenbach Sociologizes. Marcel Broodthaers: Eine Retrospektive, K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfallen, Düsseldorf,” all-over magazin für Kunst und Ästhetic 12 (April 2017)
A third and final presentation of Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective is on view in Düsseldorf (4.3–11.6.2017). It concludes a transatlantic voyage that began, manifestly, over a year before, and to the fortieth jubilee of Marcel Broodthaers’s death (1924–1976), at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition then stationed, grandly, at the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Now, finally, the works arrive at K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. One work returns back home at the end of this tour: the Section Publicité of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1972) (Fig. 1). It was mainly thanks to this “publicity section” of Broodthaers’s fictive museum – a key work of the artist, which belongs to the K21 collection – that the institution became a step-partner in this major-players’ collaboration. Since Broodthaers lived in Düsseldorf between 1970 and 1972, the works perform more than an institutional homecoming; yet in comparison with a certain sense of urgency that characterized their making, as institutional property they return “overvalued,” to speak with the artist’s words.
“The Present in Drag and Drop: On the 9th Berlin Biennale,” TOHU MAGAZINE (June 2016).
“Welcome to the post-contemporary,” say the DIS collective, curators of the 9th Berlin Biennale, with the hospitality of border control. Michal B. Ron shares her impressions of the biennial in a new critique for Tohu Magazine.
“The Presence of Work,” TOHU MAGAZINE (June 2016).
Michal B. Ron looks for eggs and feathers in Marcel Broodthaers's retrospective at MoMA
with Hannah Bruckmüller, “’a special message ...’ Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid,” all-over Magazin für Kunst und Ästhetic 11 (November 2016).
You walk down Reina Sofia’s long stone arcade. It encircles a sunny green court garden, which tempts you by its seductive grand windowpanes to relax in the calm and protected interior exterior. But, you are headed towards the palm trees lining the end of that corridor. You arrive at the entrance of the retrospective. Under a potted palm tree you face a black and white picture of Marcel Broodthaers, in which the artist is wearing a bowler hat. Entering the exhibition, you find yourself between even more palm trees, inside of a winter garden.
“When the Angel of History Plays with Fire,” TOHU MAGAZINE (March 2016).
Producing some of the wittiest artistic pranks in sculptures, installations, photography, and video works, in an ever more pompous art world, Fischli/Weiss have always advocated wild thinking. Michal B. Ron writes about the duo's major retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim.
“No Tricks, No Scams. Marcel Broodthaers at the Fridericianum, Kassel,” TOHU MAGAZINE (December 2015).
Did this year’s posthumous attempts at exhibiting Marcel Broodthaers's work rise to the challenge? Would his future retrospective at MoMA? Michal B. Ron is tackling these questions and their inherent paradox.
“Messages in Bottles: Impressions from the 14th Art Biennial in Istanbul,” TOHU MAGAZINE (October 2015).
The opening days of the 14th art biennial in Istanbul were haunted by a child’s ghost, three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who had drowned during his fatal journey, fleeing Syria. Michal B. Ron on the Istanbul Biennial
How should art institutions respond to the current political climate? Michal B. Ron reviews Paper Monument’s recent book, in which various art professionals offer their propositions to six perceptive questions.
“Other than Whom?” TOHU MAGAZINE (January 2019).
“There is no curatorial passivism, any more than there is a passivist war.” Michal B. Ron reviews Maura Reilly’s book Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating and adds a note about the heroless politeness of the recent Berlin Biennial.
“The Problem of Nostalgia: Learning from Athens in documenta 14,” TOHU MAGAZINE (August 2017).
A depressing human condition resolved with grand gestures of politics, sentimentality, fashion, and merchandise. Michal B. Ron writes about documenta 14 in Kassel.
“Richard Wagner Pornographizes, Jacques Offenbach Sociologizes. Marcel Broodthaers: Eine Retrospektive, K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfallen, Düsseldorf,” all-over magazin für Kunst und Ästhetic 12 (April 2017)
A third and final presentation of Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective is on view in Düsseldorf (4.3–11.6.2017). It concludes a transatlantic voyage that began, manifestly, over a year before, and to the fortieth jubilee of Marcel Broodthaers’s death (1924–1976), at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition then stationed, grandly, at the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Now, finally, the works arrive at K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. One work returns back home at the end of this tour: the Section Publicité of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1972) (Fig. 1). It was mainly thanks to this “publicity section” of Broodthaers’s fictive museum – a key work of the artist, which belongs to the K21 collection – that the institution became a step-partner in this major-players’ collaboration. Since Broodthaers lived in Düsseldorf between 1970 and 1972, the works perform more than an institutional homecoming; yet in comparison with a certain sense of urgency that characterized their making, as institutional property they return “overvalued,” to speak with the artist’s words.
“The Present in Drag and Drop: On the 9th Berlin Biennale,” TOHU MAGAZINE (June 2016).
“Welcome to the post-contemporary,” say the DIS collective, curators of the 9th Berlin Biennale, with the hospitality of border control. Michal B. Ron shares her impressions of the biennial in a new critique for Tohu Magazine.
“The Presence of Work,” TOHU MAGAZINE (June 2016).
Michal B. Ron looks for eggs and feathers in Marcel Broodthaers's retrospective at MoMA
with Hannah Bruckmüller, “’a special message ...’ Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid,” all-over Magazin für Kunst und Ästhetic 11 (November 2016).
You walk down Reina Sofia’s long stone arcade. It encircles a sunny green court garden, which tempts you by its seductive grand windowpanes to relax in the calm and protected interior exterior. But, you are headed towards the palm trees lining the end of that corridor. You arrive at the entrance of the retrospective. Under a potted palm tree you face a black and white picture of Marcel Broodthaers, in which the artist is wearing a bowler hat. Entering the exhibition, you find yourself between even more palm trees, inside of a winter garden.
“When the Angel of History Plays with Fire,” TOHU MAGAZINE (March 2016).
Producing some of the wittiest artistic pranks in sculptures, installations, photography, and video works, in an ever more pompous art world, Fischli/Weiss have always advocated wild thinking. Michal B. Ron writes about the duo's major retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim.
“No Tricks, No Scams. Marcel Broodthaers at the Fridericianum, Kassel,” TOHU MAGAZINE (December 2015).
Did this year’s posthumous attempts at exhibiting Marcel Broodthaers's work rise to the challenge? Would his future retrospective at MoMA? Michal B. Ron is tackling these questions and their inherent paradox.
“Messages in Bottles: Impressions from the 14th Art Biennial in Istanbul,” TOHU MAGAZINE (October 2015).
The opening days of the 14th art biennial in Istanbul were haunted by a child’s ghost, three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who had drowned during his fatal journey, fleeing Syria. Michal B. Ron on the Istanbul Biennial